Edad de Oro - Arnaud Rochard

About

Sailing from mystery to fantasy, Arnaud Rochard finds his inspiration in the origin of civilization and, in doing so, creates a new iconographic universe. The artist's research is driven by a constant quest for plastic expression, through which his technique and virtuosity can be revealed. The eye engages with the work, which fades, blurs and then returns into focus in the manner of an explorer manipulating a telescope. Controlled aesthetic content, dense. Each trace leads us to an initiatory journey projecting to infinity.

Neither only a painter, nor only a sculptor, the artist positions himself in the fold between these two techniques. From drawing to engraving, he exhausts his precise and spontaneous gestures to discover a path. The lines entangle themselves, their thickness changing and shapes are drawn in the solids and voids. Colour then intervenes in a game of hide and seek, rising to the surface in areas stretched or demarcated in the nuances of luminosity, elevating the depths of the work. On paper, canvas or ceramic, the medium ties itself to his gestures and vice versa, in a disconcerting alchemy. Sometimes left bare, raw, the materials are incorporated in the composition and appear on the surface through the superposition of multiple planes. 

A process he unravels with the aide of patterns and figurative codes composing a panaroma made of luxuriant and sparse vegetation, recalling the golden age. A time of promises of a life without constraints like an infinite paradise, non-colonised virgin earth where everything remains to be discovered. However, in this Eden, threatenings symbolic figures sometimes appear like armed knights or mythological animals. These creatures, faceless, expressionless, savage, dark and solitary, like signs of a previous era. Silhouettes the spectator can identify with. They never invade the overall perception of the subject : nature, the allegory of freedom.

For his first solo exhibition at the Felix Frachon Gallery, through his paintings, ceramics and prints, Arnaud Rochard transposes us into imagined worlds where the unexpecedness of fare is tamed. Those of a fertile humanity, where nature never ceases to amaze us with its lively and elusive force, but which silently overturns society. A latent atmosphere which furthermore encircles us with scenes of conquistadors in search of the Eldorado, the golden mirage. Two rooms, two points, of view which multiply to offer one single representation, a voyage in Uchronia. 

Maelle Delaplanche